Zig Zag Wanderer: Stories from Here, Stories from There

By Madison Smartt Bell

A story collection spanning New York to Haiti and beyond from the National Book Award–finalist and author of Barking Man.
 
Spanning twenty years, Bell’s third collection of stories showcases his phenomenal literary range and his unwavering focus on characters looking in from the outside. Punks, hustlers, and lost souls of all ages and backgrounds are drawn with an exquisite eye for detail and astonishing compassion.
 
As in the title story, many of these pieces refer to popular songs like “Fall on Me” and “Summertime,” or are centered around music (“Leadbelly in Paris”), and the settings travel the globe from New York to Paris to Haiti to London.
 
Bell, a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race, once again affirms his status as one of our best writers, one “with an ear for the seemingly inaudible emotions of life” (Los Angeles Times).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Sep 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504021296

Madison Smartt Bell

MADISON SMARTT BELLis the author of thirteen novels, including All Soul’s Rising, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two short story collections. In 2008, he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently a professor of English at Goucher College and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Zig Zag Wanderer

Stories from Here, Stories from There

Madison Smartt Bell

Contents

Petrified Forest

Parallel Lines

Small Blue Thing

Two Lives

Rabbit, Cycling

I Ain’t Blue

Summertime

Dragon’s Breath

Happy Families Are All Alike

Fall on Me

Twenty Dollars

Leadbelly in Paris

Vanishing Sky

Prey

Top of the World

The Weight of the Moon

Boy with a Coin

Zig Zag Wanderer

Acknowledgments

A Biography of Madison Smartt Bell

petrified forest

Alvin bought the dinosaurs in a fit of mall-bound depression. He had a gig playing acoustic in a record superstore, six to eight, Tuesday through Thursday, finger-picking blues miked and piped through the house PA. A novelty. It paid a decent hourly rate but it made him feel like a department store mannequin. The way the shoppers would look through him. Sometimes a kid might stop and stare. Hired to turn music into Muzak. Hell, he was lucky to get the work.

Thursday night when he got paid, he blew half the money on CDs before he got out of the store, then tramped the blazing booming corridors of the mall, disgusted with himself, the guitar case dragging down one arm and the slick plastic shopping bag swinging from the other. Spending, spending. … Oncoming waves of shoppers parted around him. He was going against the flow. Overdressed women shellacked in make-up, old folks taking their constitutional exercise here where it was relatively sheltered and safe, packs of mallrats burnishing their attitudes. One slump-shouldered scrawny specimen flipped back his long hair in a gesture that reminded him of Ethan, screwing an unlit cigarette into his slack lips, but it wasn’t Ethan, on second glance, which was good because Ethan was most definitely supposed to be home right now, watching Mary-Margaret, Meg.

Alvin cheered up, thinking of her. As he couldn’t seem to find his way out of the mall he turned into a toy store – one with pretensions to education, creativity, and so on. The dinosaurs were in a clear plastic cube by the register, molded figurines in merry colors, each about the size of his thumb. Triceratops, Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex … he couldn’t recall the names of the others, but there was a pamphlet strung to the box that appeared to explain.

He paid, and headed for his car. The route required him to pass the Rainforest Café, with its rubber robot gorillas and its fake thunderstorm, its utterly phony admonitions to do this and that to save the rainforest. If you’d made the place up, no one would believe it. His mood blackened, but he stopped all the same, when the robot alligator shifted and raised its head to roar at him from its fake pool near the entry. He wasn’t the only onlooker – the place hadn’t been open for long. Lowering the guitar case, he dug a coin from his pocket and hurled it into the rubberized maw. This gesture was supposed to help save the rainforest according to a nearby sign, and the robot’s rubber gullet was already choked with copper. Brother, Alvin thought sourly, we’re two of a kind. He was recalling himself playing ‘Spikedriver Blues’ every fifteen minutes like a jukebox on a loop, down in that damn record store.

He hefted the guitar case and turned away; now he wasn’t far from the doorway into the parking garage. Ought to quit that gig, he thought, but he’d quit too many things already. Besides, he needed the money.

By the time he’d clambered into his rustbucket, the CDs he’d bought seemed more worth having. Alvin’s car had these three virtues: it ran, it had a powerful stereo, and it didn’t look remotely worth breaking into – a good thing, considering the amount of guitar gear he was apt to have stashed in the trunk. He jack-knifed himself behind the wheel and shook the music store bag out over the passenger seat. Five minutes later he was in reissue heaven, blasting Captain Beefheart down the Jones Falls Expressway all the way to Hampden.

Finally, somebody, Paula grumped as she let him in. Seemed Ethan had gone down the block and failed to reappear, so Paula was hassled, and running late – she hadn’t got her skirt on over the black fishnet pantyhose.

Don’t put that shit on while I’m still in the house, Paula said, scoping the Beefheart CDs in his hand. Alvin shrugged and laid the boxes on the sill beside the door. Whatever. He watched her trim legs scissoring back up the stairs. Good legs, even if she was his sister. Paula looked ten years younger than forty-two, or fifteen years, on a good day. He followed her up the stairs and stood framed in the bathroom doorway, watching her watch herself in the mirror. Meg was splashing in the tub. Alvin sat down on the edge and stroked back her wet hair. Dampness seeped into the seam of his jeans.

Al, Meg said. Hi, Alvin. She slid under and looked at him winsomely, up through the water, lips pursed and cheeks blown full. He caught himself holding his own breath, until she’d surfaced with a smile.

He shifted his seat and turned toward the mirror. Paula didn’t look like him. She was nose to nose with her reflection. Her thick hair, cut to graze her shoulders, was hennaed a deep red, striking against her clear, translucent, alabaster skin. With a set of needle-sharp make-up pencils, she made undetectable adjustments to her lower lip, her lashes, studying, intent. Her reflected eye caught his, and locked.

So what’re you looking at?

Pretty lady, Alvin said, and broke the contact, shifting his eyes to the wall.

Paula lifted a leather miniskirt from the towel rack and stepped in and hauled it up over her hips. Zip this up for me, wouldja, bro? She cut a glance at her wristwatch. Man, I need to get moving. You can finish up here, right? She still needs her hair washed.

I’m on top of it, Alvin said. Paula whipped a disco purse on her shoulder and clashed down the carpetless stairs. Alvin stood in the upper hallway above her. On the threshold, Paula glanced again at the CD boxes and glanced back at him.

Don’t be playing this ugly stuff where she has to hear it, she said.

Hey, come on. Alvin put his palms in the air. I got Trout Mask Replica! This stuff is like, unfindable.

Yeah, right, Paula sniffed. She checked her keys, her cigarettes. On vinyl.

Philistine.

Snob.

Love you too, Alvin said. Have fun. Not too much fun, he added as she swung through the door, his silent, secret rider. He’d signed on for Thursdays by her rules: no comments and no questions. Through the slowly closing screen door rose a whiff of spring.

He knelt by the tub, lifting the dinosaurs from his jacket pocket and rattling them in the lucite cube. Meg’s amazed expression was a pure pleasure. One by one he lined them up on the porcelain rim. Her eyes zoomed in and she scooted nearer. Leaf-eater, she said, touching the Brontosaurus. Meat-eater. She pointed at T-Rex.

Too right, Alvin said. He nudged the Tyrannosaurus’s open red mouth against the swooping neck of the Brontosaurus and fretted the two figurines together, making a growling sound in his throat. Meg giggled nervously, pleased, retreating to the corner of the tub with her fingers pressed on her lower lip.

Washing her hair was a bit of a hassle, as she was deathly afraid of getting soap in her eyes. Afterward he tumbled her on Paula’s bed and buffed her dry with a fluffy towel, made her laugh by doing motorboat with his puckered lips against her stomach. He combed her chestnut hair – Paula’s natural color – and dressed her in a yellow cotton jumper.

Paula’s rowhouse had a tiny front porch, just big enough for a metal glider. The corpse of a sunflower dangled out of a clay pot on the railing – Paula was not gifted with an especially green thumb. But the people on the opposite corner had managed a few roses. Meg played solemnly on the steps with the dinosaurs, absorbed. Alvin rocked in the glider, stroking his heels against the concrete, nursing a beer. The air was soft and sweet as fresh laundry, inspiring a pleasant restlessness. He wondered where Paula was at that moment, where Ethan was a bit more pointedly, since it was getting late. By turning his head left or right he could look down a long recession of other people’s porches on the row. Three houses over there were some kids and in the opposite direction a cat sat licking its paws on a concrete divider, but otherwise, no action.

He went indoors and quickly stirred the sauce on the stove and grabbed another beer and changed the record. Wouldn’t do to leave Meg alone on the stoop, not for more than half a minute. Music leaked softly from the windows behind him, when he’d resumed his seat on the glider. Not that he meant to take his musical orders from Paula (who had once been a total Pat Benatar fan, who even now possessed soundtrack albums) but maybe Captain Beefheart was a little extreme for a three-year-old. Even a three-year-old afflicted by Ethan’s taste for Nine Inch Nails, Meat Puppets, and a whole slough of Goth awfulness. Therefore Alvin was playing Van Morrison, ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’ which he privately considered to be Meg’s theme song.

When the disc had played out he brought Meg into the kitchen. Alvin ate a plate of spaghetti, and gave Meg enough to smear on her face and the walls. She needed a change of clothes and a sponging after that. He settled her with the dinosaur movie and washed the dishes, then sat on the couch with Ethan’s Strat and a headphone amp, to drown out the TV. A rice-burner Strat, Korean-made, but it would play. Alvin had talked Paula into getting it, offering the headphone amp, which he’d picked up cheap, as the clincher. He doodled for an hour before he heard the slap of Ethan’s skateboard on the porch outside the screen.

Mom’s pissed, Alvin said, with extra quotation marks around it, his eyebrows rising. A skunky smell, ever so slight, had come in the door with Ethan, and Alvin noticed his eyes were a bit reddish as he flipped back his glossy long black hair. Well, he hadn’t been above smoking a bowl himself at the age of thirteen, though of course that was before they’d come up with this genetically engineered stuff where half of one hit would erase your whole brain.

You gonna rat me out?

Dude, Alvin said, "you are already busted. He tapped the side of his head indicatively. You were supposed to be here from seven? With Meg?"

Right. Whatever. Ethan jacked the skateboard with the ball of his foot. The wheels banged down on the bare floor.

Keep it down, will you? said Alvin, who’d just noticed that Meg had fallen asleep, head sideways on the carpet, ringed by a circle of dinosaurs. You eat yet? There’s spaghetti you can nuke if you want it.

Yeah. Ethan rolled the skateboard against the door and headed for the kitchen, his superwide baggy bluejeans dragging, hair hanging down his back just so. A whole riff of sarcastic remarks ran through Alvin’s head, unspoken. He remembered his own father ragging on him about his hair and clothes, back when. Ethan didn’t take after the family. His father was supposed to have been this very exotic Chinese-African-Malay pirate that Paula assured them they were all lucky to never have met. Or maybe he was some sort of wayward Pakistani. Who knew? One nigger was pretty much the same as another as far as Alvin’s father was concerned, and the old man had dropped out of touch pretty thoroughly once Ethan’s milk chocolate features appeared on the scene. Ethan was a very goodlooking kid, though. Maybe too goodlooking, Alvin sometimes thought, for his own wellbeing. This was not a problem Alvin himself was burdened with.

In the kitchen, the microwave bell went off. Alvin propped the Strat against the wall, and scooped up Meg, who burrowed against him sweetly, without waking. One dinosaur was still clutched in her hand – the little T-Rex, Alvin noticed. He drew the sheet over her, pushed the door open, and carried the tomato-stained jumper downstairs.

Got the munchies, have we? he remarked.

Ethan paused for a moment with his loaded fork hanging in the air, peering cannily over his high cheekbones at Alvin. Then, without saying anything, he completed the delivery of pasta into his mouth. Alvin rinsed the jumper, squirted on some spot remover, and set it to soak in a pan of cold water.

Alvin, Ethan said. You gonna let me on stage this weekend?

You wanna play the Hat? Alvin said. You want to sit in on blues, you’d be welcome. Ethan in fact had a nice touch with blues slide, though it didn’t really seem to interest him much. He was tossing his hair back now, dismissing the suggestion.

Well, Alvin said. You can’t get up there with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ Everybody’s gonna walk out. Including the rhythm section.

I was thinking Mojo’s, Ethan said, dropping his empty fork on the plate. Saturday, late.

Yeah, maybe.… Alvin considered. It was true that just about anything went at the last set at Mojo’s. There’s legality issues, you know.

"Aw, man –"

Plus which I doubt you’re really gonna be going out this weekend, once Paula catches up with you.

Ethan looked away, letting the dark wing of hair fall to hide his profile. He drummed his fingers on the table.

You want to work something up for the Hat? Alvin said. I got the acoustic, out in the trunk.

I dunno, Ethan said. I’m kinda tired right now. Crashing, Alvin thought, and then, take it back. Anyway, I got homework.

Whoa, Alvin said. Now that’s pretty desperate.

A vast white alkali flat unrolled across the field of his dream, ringed with serrated purple mountains at the horizon. The glowing chemical pallor of its surface was studded all over with chunks of stone prehistoric tree trunks, streaked with lurid veins of blue and red. A weird vermillion light pulsed from the sky. Alvin’s vision rushed low over the scene at a frightening speed, like a strafing aircraft. Over it all was a thundering jumble of bass and drums, like the pounding feet of some many-legged uncoordinated animal, scrawl of guitar noise and a voice intoning – the sky ain’t blue no more – what’s on the leaves ain’t dew no more – The movement stopped and there was cold stasis, stone logs scattered in the acrid dust. A long-winged black shadow passed overhead, and Alvin felt a burst of fear and enlightenment. Now I get it, the dream was thinking, now I know why little kids like dinosaurs! He jerked forward, coming awake with his heart beating fast and his mouth cottony, a blanket tangled around his legs on the downstairs sofa-bed. The noise was Paula opening the door, blue dawn light outlining the frayed edges of her hair.

Alvin got up and padded into the kitchen. Paula was diving in the refrigerator, her leather skirt crooked, loose on her hips. Tell me you didn’t drink all the beer, she grumbled. But she’d already garnered a can of Natty Boh by the time she finished the sentence.

Rough night? Alvin said, knowing that he shouldn’t. Paula had just discovered the jumper soaking in the pan.

Goddammit, what the hell happened here? She wheeled on him. "She was cleaned up, Alvin, she’d already been fed – man, I’ll never get those stains out."

You won’t have to, Alvin said, feeling his throat close down, the strangling pressure – it’ll always be this way. I’ll get it taken care of before I leave.

Yeah, right. Paula seemed to crumple. Okay, so I’m cranky.

Now in what sense of the word would that be? He didn’t even want to think it. Paula, Alvin said. He gathered the base of her head in his right hand. You need to crash, no?

Yeah, okay. She dropped her forehead on his shoulder, then looked up. Alvin, can you cover the day?

I’m good to noon, Alvin said. After that I got lessons.

By twelve-thirty he was blasting south on the beltway, Beefheart roaring in his ears, his mind adrift on the matter of Paula. What she was into, what he owed her. He hoped to God she wasn’t smoking rocks again. That was such a hard one to come back from. He had a tendency to speed up behind that thought, and forced himself to lighten his foot on the gas – no use getting a ticket, anyway. Tortured horn music boiled from the speakers, foaming disorder and ugliness. He owed her big time, that was a fact. Paula was ten years older than Alvin, and she’d come through for him when nobody else would or could, the last two years of high school after Mom had signed into the crazy house for keeps.

The rug’s wearing out that we walk on, Captain Beefheart howled. Soon it’ll fray and we’ll drop dead into yesterday – Alvin was barely half-hearing it now. Paula, he thought, what are we gonna do? She’d been a wild child already back then, long gone from the house before Mom checked out permanently, running with the local bikers and dancing for dollars in the strip clubs out Eastern Avenue, doing whatever the hell she pleased. But if she felt like it she could dress for success and pound the hallways of the high school, hassle the teachers and guidance counselors. Not a one of them could stand up to her. She’d made them all help keep Alvin’s nose in reasonably frequent contact with the grindstone, and she’d backed up the concept herself at home. Made sure he took the SATs and filled out college applications, and she’d been behind him, some of the time, through seven years at three institutions: psychology, anthropology, musicology … and no degree at the end of it all.

What did you get for all that effort? The Alvin of today, Thursday night babysitter (and a good one too, if he did say it himself). Paula deserved her Thursday night out. All her work was night work, cocktail waitressing and such, which was part of the problem, Alvin thought: when you got off at 2 a.m., your apron full of tax-free cash and ready for some R & R, cocaine in some form seemed a logical choice. He’d walked her through rehab one time already. He had done that. But if there had to be a second time it would be harder – for her; you got the idea that nothing was really gonna change. Now if she could get into some other line of work … but where else was she going to make that kind of money? And besides, she liked the life. A decent boyfriend might help, but Paula tended to walk all over nice guys. In her quest for somebody who could handle her, she was apt to bring home mean sonsabitches, which was something else Alvin didn’t want to think about, and wasn’t allowed to think about, as a matter of policy. No comments, no questions. Not that his own love life was all that exemplary.

Doing it wrong seemed to run in the family, along with the latent schizophrenia, and by the time Alvin pulled into the parking lot of George’s Jungle of Guitars, he was flashing on that one time he’d tried acid, back when, and Paula’s blaze of righteous fury: Don’t you know that’s not for us? Not for me and not for you. I don’t care what your moron friends are telling you – don’t you know where that can take you? You wanna end up with Mom and Bruce, doing life in the rubber room, drawing funny pictures on the wall with your own shit?

Alvin had parked but he left the car running, Beefheart still banging hard on his ears. Through the spotty windshield he distantly registered his first guitar student, unpacking his case from the trunk of his car. Fact of it was, he barely remembered Bruce at all – Bruce was only two years younger than Paula, and when Alvin was eight he had gone on a bad trip that lasted a long time, till Bruce finally scored a successful suicide before his twentieth birthday. The guitar student was moving his way across the lot. He tapped on the window, then flinched when Alvin rolled it down.

Yipe, he said. "What are you playing?"

This is classic, Alvin informed him, feeling his own grin uncomfortably tight on his face. Captain Beefheart. He cut the motor; the music died. You’re probably too young to appreciate it.

They were young, mostly, his guitar students, teenagers or even younger than that, a few of them. Now and then a grownup might crop up unexpectedly, apt to have smarter ears than the punk kids, but also of course slower hands. And there you had it. Alvin kept a CD Walkman jacked into the amp in the back room of the Jungle where he received his clients. He’d learn whatever crap the kids brought in and teach it back to them in a half-hour’s time. It kept them happy, so their parents paid George, and George paid Alvin, and all was cool.

He made it back to Fells Point by dusk, and humped the Gibson case up the narrow turns of the stairway to his third floor apartment, which he was lucky to have, given the rush of gentrification round the nabe. The place was a little grotty just now, since Amy had been gone for about ten days, working trade shows in Charlotte and Atlanta. When was she due back, Monday? Amy didn’t exactly live with him – she had most definitely kept her own place so far, but still there was a tendency for her to sleep over, partly because Alvin’s place was walking distance from twenty or thirty nifty night spots – the Greenwich Village of Baltimore! … or anyway some people wanted to call it that.

Amy had influence. Squeaky-clean influence. Alvin lowered the guitar case – not quite enough clear space on the floor to accommodate the whole thing. He sniffed the air. A film of dust lay over it all, more guitars in and out of their cases, zillions of CDs that came in the mail on account of reviews Alvin wrote for the local giveaway rag (half of them still in their packaging) stacks and shelves of books from all his forlorn uncompleted specialties. The baseboards were lined with the couple of thousand LPs Alvin had collected, though his snazzy vertical turntable was nonoperational for some obscure high-tech reason. He definitely ought to find a way to vacuum before Monday. Still more definitely, empty the cat box, but not now.

He swapped out the acoustic for the Les Paul and headed out. Gulls came shrieking in from the waterfront, banking over the cobblestone square. Crap on a yuppie, make my day, Alvin thought, but then where would he be without the tourists and their disposable cash? He didn’t really feel so sour that evening, with the salt air fresh and tingling with spring, stirring germs of change inside him. With that he was thinking of Meg, last evening, a moment when she’d risen from the dinosaurs on the stoop and stood attentively for what seemed a long time, her face in the wind and a light in her brown eyes.

Free food at the Hat Club was part of Alvin’s deal, and the kitchen wasn’t bad at all. He got a plate of steamed shrimp and a bowl of gumbo and ate slowly, chasing it with beer, as the rest of the band drifted in and set up. Friday at the Hat was eight to one a.m., mostly blues standards. Every now and then they might mix it up with some of the poppier Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, a few other acts like that, but usually it was blues changes behind it all. The last set was open mike for singers, and maybe a stray horn player might wander in, but normally they knew who they were dealing with, nothing was apt to get too strange. Ethan didn’t turn up all night, which Alvin was just as happy about – he wasn’t in the mood to struggle with him over pushing the repertory, though he did wonder how deep Paula had sunk her claws into the boy. Not a good plan to fail to show up when and where Paula needed you to. But she’d be working tonight herself; the weekends were her mainstay.

A good feel on the stand throughout the evening, Alvin thought, and everybody down in the groove. He wasn’t even registering the other players as the people they were, the people he knew – just bass, just drums, just rhythm guitar, until it all cooked up together, married like flavors in a stew, and his own lines reeling out effortlessly without him having to plan or think. He was riding a rising tide of euphoria and though he knew it would eventually drop him in a trough, he felt too good to worry about it now. People were getting off on it too, especially, Alvin noticed, one heavyset girl with thick black hair and an East Indian cast to her features, who stayed with her breasts resting on the rail of the bandstand and a rapt, stoned smile on her face.

But no. Alvin was not in the spirit of that sort of adventure. He felt too good. When the last set was done he wrapped his gear, passed on all invitations for afterhoursing, and slid out.

Good cheer was still with him when he woke the next morning with the weight of Bill the Cat bearing down on his chest. One dark wing of his dream passed over the desert and was gone, leaving yellow sunshine spilling in through a tumble of vines from the pots on the sill. He sat up and Bill slid to the floor and collected himself, yowling for tuna. Once Alvin had fed him, the big ginger tabby compressed himself to undulate under the sash and out, walking the concrete sill to the nearest fire escape. Alvin kept that window locked on a two-inch gap – too small for a thief to extrude a guitar.

He loaded up the back of his car with junk CDs to be sold or traded. It was too early for the secondhand shops, though, so he drove to Paula’s instead. Meg was out on the steps, and when he climbed out of the car she ran over and gave his leg a hug so hard it squeezed her eyes shut, and sent a warm wave splashing from his heels to the top of his head.

Paula sat on the glider, looking slightly stunned.

Man, she said. She likes to get up early. You gonna be around a while?

Alvin took Meg up to the playground, using the stroller since it was a fair distance, though cool, and he figured he could use the walk. They did the slide and the swings a few minutes, then closed in on the whirligig. Alvin ran around and around, pushing it till everything blurred, then jumped aboard himself and collapsed against her; they held on to each other, breathless and dizzied, until the wheel had coasted to a stop. He kept at it until he was completely winded.

They strolled back to the house. The dinosaurs were scattered under the glider, most of them anyway. I see Triceratops, Alvin said. I see Brontosaurus, but where is my man T-Rex?

Meg’s face clouded over. From the doorway, Paula gave them the cut-throat signal. Alvin shut up.

T-Rex is a bad guy, she explained, when Alvin followed her into the kitchen. She’d showered, her hair was still wet, and she looked fresher. Want some coffee?

When she opened the cupboard, Alvin saw the inch-high Tyrannosaurus erect and gaping pinkly among the mugs.

Yeah, said Paula. We had to put him in jail. He kills the other ones. Bites their necks.

Reviews for Zig Zag Wanderer

[andersonden · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A perfectly fitted concept and design. The reversal of stories from here and stories from there meeting in the center and flipping over to the other side was ingenious and clever. The stories themselves are nicely fitted out vehicles for the trips on which they transport you.

[tloeffler_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An eclectic collection of short stories, not really classifiable to any particular category. But good stories!